A neuroscientist is running a ‘Pirate Bay for scientists’ — and it is offering free access to 48 million academic papers

Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub, a website dubbed the "Pirate Bay for scientists" by offering peer-reviewed academic papers to download for free, is thumbing its nose at copyright holders following an infringement lawsuit battle in the US.

Sci-Hub is the brainchild of Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who is now based in Russia.

When she was writing her thesis in 2009, Elbakyan found it difficult to access the research she needed to complete her work, as she needed to download many papers, and each paper retailed for up to $30 each.

To get through her thesis, Elbakyan was forced to download pirated versions of the academic papers for free, and eventually, after being introduced to a website that enabled researchers to share and trade the academic papers they needed with people who had paid for them, she decided to take the idea further and create her own website around 2011 or 2012.

Tricking journals with university proxies

Today, the Sci-Hub website boasts 48 million academic papers and has now gone viral, because it features technology similar to anonymising proxy websites. Rather than just enabling users to search for and extract the papers they need, the Sci-Hub website is programmed to automatically search for papers on important topics and work out how to download them to its database without spending a penny.

Since various universities in the world have paid subscriber access to different premium journal services, the website is able to automatically trawl through different university proxies to trick the relevant journal's website into believing that the user accessing the academic paper has the relevant credentials similar to a paying customer.

Once the paper is unlocked, Sci-Hub then downloads the paper to its database and even looks for other missing papers on similar topics to download, so that all the researcher has to do is initiate a search, and the paper will come up, ready to be downloaded for nothing.

Sued for copyright infringement and blocked in the US

At its peak in 2015, the website received 80,000 visitors a day, according to Nature magazine, and had become so popular that academic publisher Elsevier brought a copyright lawsuit against the website, claiming that it had lost between $75,000 - $150,000 in revenue due to the piracy.

On 28 October 2015, a New York district court found in favor of Elsevier and placed a temporary injunction against Sci-Hub, as well as suspending access to the website's Sci-Hub.org domain, which has caused visitor numbers to drop to 30,000 a day. But other than that, not much else can be done to physically stop Elbakyan as she has no US assets to forfeit nor is she a US citizen, so, just like Pirate Bay's multiple domain names, she quickly moved the website to Sci-Hub.io, where it continues to be freely accessible.

"There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge, I believe," Elbakyan told RT. "[According to Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights], everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."

Moving to the Dark Web

Not only that, but Elbakyan has also moved Sci-Hub's servers onto the Dark Web - a section of the internet not discoverable by conventional means, such as through Google or other search engines or by directly entering a website URL. This is where cybercriminals typically list illegal goods and services like drugs, firearms and hackers-for-hire and using the Tor anonymity network as a cloak to protect their real identities.

"Even if legal access to [Sci-Hub] is blocked, the user can still get in through the TOR network and immediately gain access to all the articles," said Elbakyan. "However, we intend to fight for free access to all information. After all, using TOR still provides obstacles."